No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
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Not that I’m advocating for Apple’s inexcusable behaviour, but as someone who’s worked in IT managing fleets of hundreds of Thinkpads (among others like Apple, Dell, Acer, HP), respectfully, they are far less reliable and durable than a MacBook. The only devices I had with higher failure rates than ThinkPads were Acer laptops.
They are certainly more repairable, but so are others like Dell and HP. Lenovo were one of the earlier manufacturers to pull some anti-repair moves such as soldering memory to the mainboard (on the Yoga models).
I think your statement is far more accurate in the days when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand, but unfortunately Lenovo have run it into the ground as far as quality goes.
All that said, I certainly hope we see more projects like Framework so that these big manufacturers can get some sort of reality check.
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You’re just flat out wrong on this.
There’s a Wikipedia article for each series of thinkpad/idea book or whatever and it’s got a color coded chart you can scroll through to see the progression from more user replaceable to less.
Lenovo still has some lines that are modular, but they’re doing what everyone else is.
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The e series and non-yoga L13s after 2019 (no surprise there), the t-series is available with partial soldered ram and a bunch of other stuff after 2013 (O.O) and only has a few configurations without soldered parts after 2020. Even the p series has partial soldered skus and one fully soldered one.
Oh yeah and all that is true for cpus as well. I didn’t feel like deciphering the two incredibly close colors they use on that chart for “socketed” and “soldered” so I’m not making specific claims but there’s a lot of soldered cpus in the thinkpad line now.
There has been a movement industry wide towards soldered components and Lenovo hasn’t completely committed the thinkpad line to it but they’re absolutely dipping their toes in.
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This is the opinion of someone who has not used a Thinkpad nor a MacBook built within the past three years.
That’s my thought, too. My IBM T20 is still in great working order (with the original hardware, except for the PCI card, which I lost). My Lenovo T440 just died a couple months back. The T20 had Win98SE then Win2000 then XP and was used as a daily driver for about 5 years, before I had to retire it due to hardware specs (I still use it occasionally, but it now has antiX on it). The T440 had Win7 then Win10 and was a daily for about 3 years before it started having mechanical issues, then finally fried. I got an E595 and stuck Fedora on it. Hopefully, it will last long enough to get me saved up for a Framework, but I doubted. A part of me believes that the old IBM ThinkPads will outlast humanity, along with cockroaches and McDonald’s fries. Honestly, I should learn my lesson and stop buying Lenovo (used or otherwise), but I had to have something since the T440 letdown and the E595 was on a liquidation sale.
The L14 Gen1 I have must be an exception then. The fingerprint reader isn’t compatible at all (I feel kinda taken for a ride there since it’s seemingly the only Synaptics reader without Linux compatibility) and both Bluetooth and USB are very buggy. I haven’t used it with Windows, so the latter two may also be down to crappy firmware. Either way I’m rather disappointed for the price tag and probably not buying Lenovo again any time soon.
T14 Gen 2 (AMD) has Linux compatibility issues with the touchpad of all things.
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